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America’s got a fundamental problem with how information flows through its economy and society. Encouraged by a light touch regulatory framework, early internet business models - from Amazon to Facebook - have metastasized, in the process creating an information architecture that’s proven toxic to our society. As John Battelle, our guest at the January What’s Now: New York event, sees it, the problem comes down to who controls the flow of information in our increasingly interconnected world. But to understand that flow, we first have to visualize it, then we must imagine alternatives.

Almost all businesses - from early stage investors to small firms to multinational corporations - wrestle with some form of trying to figure out what leading consumers really want now, and what the bulk of consumers will obviously want tomorrow. Soraya Darabi, our next guest at What’s Now: New York, is a bonafide expert in figuring out what’s cool now that’s coming next. The relatively young entrepreneur co-founded a couple highly successful venture-backed businesses, the retail startup Zady, one of Fast Company’s top 10 most innovative retail companies in 2014, and the Foodspotting app, acquired by OpenTable.

Almost two years ago environmentalist Paul Hawken used a What’s Now: San Francisco event to launch Project Drawdown that identified 100 of the best ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and start to reverse global warming. In our November 28th What’s Now event, energy expert Hal Harvey takes the next step by laying out the best policies that could be enacted right now to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deal with climate change. Harvey, CEO of Energy Innovation, is one of the field’s most respected thought leaders who is known for giving practical, realistic advice about climate policy to government officials, cities, states, utilities, and energy-conscious businesses.

Kai-Fu Lee, our guest at the next What's Now: San Francisco, thinks China is poised to supersede the United States and lead the way into the next era of AI. Lee makes a compelling case that China is better positioned to drive the practical applications of AI through the economy. Lee will be traveling from China to the San Francisco Bay Area and will anchor a conversation with our community, including many locals working in AI who might challenge his argument.

Traffic congestion in New York City is bad, but it soon could be much better. Really. Take it from Robin Chase, the co-founder of Zipcar who now leads NUMo, the New Urban Mobility Alliance, our featured guest at September’s What's Now: New York. One way to understand the current urban mobility problem in New York City and many cities around the world is to see our transportation system trapped between two paradigms. The old paradigm was organized for the last century around personal cars, while the new paradigm that's emerging will be based on shared modalities, newly easy and convenient because of technology.

One way to understand the plight of the tech world right now is to pull back and understand the field of economics in the last 400 years. For much of that time the field has debated where value in the economy actually comes from – such as land, labor, capital. According to economist Mariana Mazzucato, our featured guest at our next What’s Now: San Francisco, it is necessary first to publicly debate what is really adding value to our economy so that we can create a new form of capitalism that works for us all, including in the tech industry.

First the good news: the world is going through an explosion of knowledge in pretty much every industry and field. Every day 10,000 new scientific papers are published, just in English, to give just one example. Now the bad news: No human being in any field can possibly keep up with all that new knowledge production. Most authors are aware of less than 1 percent of information related to their topic. Here's the even worse news: Most innovation comes from connecting up insights across multiple fields. But now for the really good news: Artificial Intelligence has arrived just in time to augment our human brains and help us master that explosion of knowledge and consequently accelerate innovation in every industry and every field.

What started out as a simple game of shooting a ball through a hoop has turned into a high-tech juggernaut. The NBA, more than any other professional sports league, has attracted owners from the tech world, built super high-tech stadiums, and adopted big-data analytics and other tech tools to run the business. No team is more representative of this trend than the Sacramento Kings - who built a state-of-the-art stadium that won Best Elite Sports Facility in the world by the Sports Technology Awards in 2017. Our July What’s Now: San Francisco will feature Chris Kelly, one of the major owners who bought the Kings in 2013 and who now sits on the Executive Board. Chris also was Facebook’s first Chief Privacy Officer, first General Counsel, and Head of Global Public Policy who helped take the startup from its college roots to one of the most successful companies in the world.

What’s a nice tech investor like Esther Dyson doing in Muskegon, Michigan? Dyson was an early tech guru, impresario of the highly influential conference PC Forum and newsletter Release 1.0, friendly with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Yet now she’s regularly flying from her base in Manhattan into a handful of small communities in America’s heartland, trying to spread the same message of long-term thinking and learning through trial and error that pervades Silicon Valley. The problems she’s addressing have a lot to do with time. At July’s What’s Now: New York event, presented in partnership with Capgemini at their Applied Innovation Exchange, Dyson will lead a conversation about how we need to rethink private and public behavior by shifting from short-term to longer-term horizons.

Fifty years ago the Whole Earth Catalog burst onto the cultural scene and helped set in motion waves of innovation that reverberated through the San Francisco Bay Area and the rest of America - and that continue to this day. The one-and-only Stewart Brand was the creative force behind that unique media publication and cultural phenomenon and we’re honored that he talked about the Whole Earth’s intellectual and entrepreneurial legacy at our What’s Now: San Francisco. He also talked the positive side of having to solve a civilizational-scale problem like climate change and why he believes we will solve it. The event also featured a dozen remarkable people give moving testimonials about the legacy of the catalog and Stewart. Be sure to watch this unforgettable evening.

Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills, and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Secretary-General at the OECD believes that in our new economy, skills matter much more than qualifications. Technology both replaces and complements workers, says Schleicher.

Ann-Marie Slaughter heads the nearly 20 year old New America - a think tank that considers itself "a civic platform that connects a research institute, technology lab, solutions network, media hub and public forum." Her wide-ranging and energizing conversation touched on many of the challenges and downsides of the new era of tech as as well as her optimism relating to how communities throughout the US are finding solutions.

Eric Ries, the bestselling author of Silicon Valley bible The Lean Startup, wants to accomplish something that many in the business world think will be harder than nuclear reactors: reinventing the stock exchange to prioritize long-term, rather than short-term, gains. The problems with our economy are so obvious that for the most part we don't talk about them anymore, says Ries, and many of them stem from the fact that elite decision makers have adopted an unusually short-term framework. This problem is further compounded because the number of decision makers today is much smaller than it used to be—there are half

Brian Sager is a polymath and serial entrepreneur who has taken on fields as varied as biotechnology, clean energy and music. He most recent venture, Omnity, uses machine learning, and is in position to take on the challenge of searching and connecting the rush of data being produced in our digital world. Every day 10,000 new scientific papers are published, just in English, and other fields are also producing data at an extraordinary rate. No human being in any field can possibly keep up with all that new knowledge production.

Lenny Mendonca, Chair of the New America Foundation, sees strong parallels between our current economic moment and the tail-end of the Industrial Revolution, which coincided with the progressive movement of the late 20th century.

George Church is one of the world’s leading geneticists. He is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and his innovations have contributed to nearly all "next generation" DNA sequencing methods. He has also pioneered new privacy, biosafety, environmental & biosecurity policies. Church is known for pioneering the specialized fields of personal genomics and synthetic biology.

Niels Nielsen, Managing Director of the World Refugee School, is on a mission to make sure that the roughly 32 million refugee children around the world receive an education. If you add to this the number forcefully displayed children and people in fragile economies, the number of children who don't receive an education is as high as 600 million, says Nielsen. The World Refugee School aims to provide high-quality, inexpensive education to these children using technology.

Alex Tapscott, a blockchain investor, entrepreneur, and author, launched The Blockchain Research Institute with his father in 2017. The Institute, which is comprised of more than 50 companies and governments—including Tencent, IBM, and the government of Canada—employs more than 40 research associates around the world, all of whom are researching "the way blockchain is going to change everything," in Tapscott's words.

Reinvent Explained in 100 Words

Reinvent is a startup media company on a mission to help reinvent our world by driving conversations with leading innovators about how to solve the many challenges of our time. We connect up networks of remarkable people from diverse fields and focus them on how to overcome a big challenge and find a better way forward. We open up these deep-dive conversations to sophisticated audiences who want to understand what’s possible in the near future. Reinvent is based in San Francisco and partners with organizations out to drive more innovation, spread big ideas and change the world for the better.